Pickleball is no longer just a sport attracting players to local courts. Over the last few years, it has started attracting serious investment, with the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) and Major League Pickleball (MLP) at the centre of that growth.
The money coming into the sport reflects a growing belief that pickleball can become a sustainable professional sports business.
One of the most visible examples is MLP. Gary Vaynerchuk and Ryan Harwood entered Major League Pickleball ownership in 2022, with Vaynerchuk later saying that his investment in the New Jersey Fives was around $500,000. At the time, professional pickleball was still in its early stages.
The picture looks very different today.
The LA Mad Drops were valued at $13 million in a controlling-stake transaction, while the Palm Beach Royals entered MLP at a $16 million expansion-franchise valuation. Those numbers give an indication of how much the perceived value of professional pickleball has changed in just a few years.
MLP has also become part of a much larger professional pickleball ecosystem alongside the PPA Tour. The two organisations eventually came together under the same commercial umbrella after a period in which rival professional structures competed for the future of the sport.
That consolidation is important for investors because professional pickleball needs more than individual tournaments to become a major sports property. It needs recognisable players, teams, events and a consistent calendar that audiences can follow.
There are already signs that the audience is beginning to develop.
The 2025 PPA World Championships and MLP Cup in Texas attracted more than 60,000 spectators and generated more than $1.1 million in combined ticket and hospitality revenue. PickleballTV recorded more than 70 million minutes watched across the two competitions.
MLP took another step forward in 2026. Its Finals on CBS averaged 773,000 viewers, according to the league, making it the biggest audience for an MLP broadcast. More than 10,000 spectators attended the three-day Finals event at CityPickle in Central Park.
For investors, those numbers offer something important: evidence that professional pickleball can attract an audience beyond the people actually playing the sport.
But that is also where the biggest question lies.
Pickleball still has to turn players into fans. MLP needs franchises that people identify with, while the PPA needs players and tournaments that audiences want to follow. The sport needs rivalries, personalities and stories that make individual matches matter.
The investment is therefore not simply a bet on pickleball as it exists today.
It is a bet on what the PPA, MLP and the wider professional game can build around it tomorrow.